"This thing was humongous": Megalodon teeth and where to find them in Virginia

Steve Earley/The Virginian-Pilot

Suffolk resident Jud Keeling's collection of megalodon teeth he's fished from the muck at a secret spot along a local river, photographed in February 2016.

Suffolk resident Jud Keeling's collection of megalodon teeth he's fished from the muck at a secret spot along a local river, photographed in February 2016. (Steve Earley/The Virginian-Pilot)

Katherine HafnerStaff writer

Beachgoers tend to spend their time looking up: at the horizon, admiring the waves, watching birds take flight.

But next time, try looking down at your feet, said Fred Farris, deputy director of the Virginia Living Museum in Newport News. You just might spy some prehistoric shark teeth lying in the sand.

"Once you start collecting, you can't look up from your feet. It's mesmerizing," Farris said. "You've got to be super lucky, at the right place at the right time. But people find them all the time. … You never know when you're going to find one."

As fossil collectors and fauna-philes already know, southeastern Virginia is home to many a fossilized shark tooth as well as other old shells and bones. Farris said everyone from seasoned fossil hunters to schoolchildren come into the museum with local finds, asking for help identifying their treasures.

"I have run into small companies who actually sell these megalodon teeth," Riley wrote in an email. "They find them apparently somewhere around the Virginia Beach area. And so I have become curious of the why and where."

One local, Suffolk’s Jud Keeling, has found scores of fossilized shark teeth along a nearby river — but he's not giving up the location.

Farris helped explain.

When the supercontinent Pangaea formed almost 300 million years ago, the East Coast and Africa were pressed together, creating the Blue Ridge Mountains, he said. As the continents moved apart, lakes formed and seawater filled eastern Virginia, becoming part of the Atlantic Ocean.

For most of its history, Tidewater was underwater — a warm, shallow coral reef only 50 to 100 feet deep.

From 30 million up to about 3 million years ago, it was also home to a famed species that may sound familiar: the megalodon.

The ancient shark was up to 60 feet long – think of a particularly long school bus, or a great white three times over – and 10 times heavier than an elephant. A single tooth reached about 7 inches long.

"This thing was humongous," Farris said.

Sharks lose a lot of teeth as they rotate them throughout their lifetime. That means there are plenty to find millions of years later.

"There are a lot of them out there," Farris said. "The trick is, all those sediments from those timeframes are buried fairly deep."

The places to find them are "where a river has eroded through the earth and exposed a bank," he said.

Three state parks – Chippokes Plantation in Surry, York River in Williamsburg and Westmoreland on Virginia's Northern Neck – are key spots to find megalodon teeth, said Nancy Heltman, visitor services director for Virginia State Parks.

Visitors there are allowed to take home the fossils they find, including shark teeth – as long as they don't dig down to find them. Westmoreland doesn't have a limit, while the others ask that you take only one, Heltman said.

"We emphasize that you don't need to be greedy," she said.

People come and use standard kitchen colanders to sift through the sand, she said, while others happen to stumble across them.

"A lot of rivers in the James River watershed still have quite a bit of shark’s teeth," she said. "As the tides and the water ebbs and flows, it brings them up closer to the shore."

Two days after a storm is ideal, when the movement has pushed things to the surface and the choppy water has died down. While at Westmoreland for a meeting after a recent storm, Heltman said, she saw someone with a whole handful of teeth they'd found after a few hours on the beach.

People have a chance of discovering ancient shark teeth around most embankments in southeastern Virginia, but they'll have better luck at certain spots like the York, Nottoway and Chickahominy rivers.

However, Farris emphasized, those seeking the teeth should be careful not to tread onto private property while doing so.

Because of its fearsome size, the megalodon has long captured people's imagination and looms large even in popular culture. The premise of "The Meg," a film released this summer, is that the creature never really went extinct.

Farris said it's hard to get a sense of the creature's size from its teeth alone.

"The tooth's impressive, but I don't think in (people's) greatest imagination they are picturing a shark as big as it really was."